The Frontier in American History

The Frontier in American History PDF Author: Frederick Jackson Turner
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner is a seminal work that profoundly shaped the understanding of the American character and its development through the lens of westward expansion. First delivered as a paper in 1893, Turner's thesis argues that the American frontier experience was pivotal in forging a unique national identity, distinct from European influences. Turner contends that the availability of free land and the challenges of frontier life fostered individualism, democracy, and innovation among Americans. He explores how the continuous movement westward not only transformed the landscape but also the psyche of the nation, creating a spirit of resilience and adaptability. Throughout the work, he highlights the cultural, economic, and political implications of this expansion, examining how it influenced various aspects of American life, from social structures to the arts. The Frontier in American History is celebrated for its groundbreaking ideas and has been a foundational text in American historiography. Turner's insights into the significance of the frontier have sparked extensive debate and further research, prompting historians to reassess the complexities of American identity and the impact of westward expansion on different communities. Readers are drawn to The Frontier in American History for its compelling narrative and thought-provoking analysis, making it essential for anyone interested in understanding the roots of American culture and values. Owning a copy of The Frontier in American History provides an opportunity to engage with Turner's influential ideas, offering insights that remain relevant in contemporary discussions about identity, culture, and the American experience, making it a valuable addition to any library.

The Frontier in American History

The Frontier in American History PDF Author: Frederick Jackson Turner
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner is a seminal work that profoundly shaped the understanding of the American character and its development through the lens of westward expansion. First delivered as a paper in 1893, Turner's thesis argues that the American frontier experience was pivotal in forging a unique national identity, distinct from European influences. Turner contends that the availability of free land and the challenges of frontier life fostered individualism, democracy, and innovation among Americans. He explores how the continuous movement westward not only transformed the landscape but also the psyche of the nation, creating a spirit of resilience and adaptability. Throughout the work, he highlights the cultural, economic, and political implications of this expansion, examining how it influenced various aspects of American life, from social structures to the arts. The Frontier in American History is celebrated for its groundbreaking ideas and has been a foundational text in American historiography. Turner's insights into the significance of the frontier have sparked extensive debate and further research, prompting historians to reassess the complexities of American identity and the impact of westward expansion on different communities. Readers are drawn to The Frontier in American History for its compelling narrative and thought-provoking analysis, making it essential for anyone interested in understanding the roots of American culture and values. Owning a copy of The Frontier in American History provides an opportunity to engage with Turner's influential ideas, offering insights that remain relevant in contemporary discussions about identity, culture, and the American experience, making it a valuable addition to any library.

The Significance of the Frontier in American History

The Significance of the Frontier in American History PDF Author: Frederick Jackson Turner
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781015420786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Frontier in American Culture

The Frontier in American Culture PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520915321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Log cabins and wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill and General Custer. These and other frontier images pervade our lives, from fiction to films to advertising, where they attach themselves to products from pancake syrup to cologne, blue jeans to banks. Richard White and Patricia Limerick join their inimitable talents to explore our national preoccupation with this uniquely American image. Richard White examines the two most enduring stories of the frontier, both told in Chicago in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition. One was Frederick Jackson Turner's remarkably influential lecture, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"; the other took place in William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's flamboyant extravaganza, "The Wild West." Turner recounted the peaceful settlement of an empty continent, a tale that placed Indians at the margins. Cody's story put Indians—and bloody battles—at center stage, and culminated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as "Custer's Last Stand." Seemingly contradictory, these two stories together reveal a complicated national identity. Patricia Limerick shows how the stories took on a life of their own in the twentieth century and were then reshaped by additional voices—those of Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans, and others, whose versions revisit the question of what it means to be an American. Generously illustrated, engagingly written, and peopled with such unforgettable characters as Sitting Bull, Captain Jack Crawford, and Annie Oakley, The Frontier in American Culture reminds us that despite the divisions and denials the western movement sparked, the image of the frontier unites us in surprising ways.

Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History

Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History PDF Author: Bradley J. Parker
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081653411X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Despite a half century of attempts by social scientists to compare frontiers around the world, the study of these regions is still closely associated with the nineteenth-century American West and the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. As a result, the very concept of the frontier is bound up in Victorian notions of manifest destiny and rugged individualism. The frontier, it would seem, has been tamed. This book seeks to open a new debate about the processes of frontier history in a variety of cultural contexts, untaming the frontier as an analytic concept, and releasing it in a range of unfamiliar settings. Drawing on examples from over four millennia, it shows that, throughout history, societies have been formed and transformed in relation to their frontiers, and that no one historical case represents the normal or typical frontier pattern. The contributors—historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists—present numerous examples of the frontier as a shifting zone of innovation and recombination through which cultural materials from many sources have been unpredictably channeled and transformed. At the same time, they reveal recurring processes of frontier history that enable world-historical comparison: the emergence of the frontier in relation to a core area; the mutually structuring interactions between frontier and core; and the development of social exchange, merger, or conflict between previously separate populations brought together on the frontier. Any frontier situation has many dimensions, and each of the chapters highlights one or more of these, from the physical and ideological aspects of Egypt’s Nubian frontier to the military and cultural components of Inka outposts in Bolivia to the shifting agrarian, religious, and political boundaries in Bengal. They explore cases in which the centripetal forces at work in frontier zones have resulted in cultural hybridization or “creolization,” and in some instances show how satellite settlements on the frontiers of core polities themselves develop into new core polities. Each of the chapters suggests that frontiers are shaped in critical ways by topography, climate, vegetation, and the availability of water and other strategic resources, and most also consider cases of population shifts within or through a frontier zone. As these studies reveal, transnationalism in today’s world can best be understood as an extension of frontier processes that have developed over thousands of years. This book’s interdisciplinary perspective challenges readers to look beyond their own fields of interest to reconsider the true nature and meaning of frontiers.

Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner

Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner PDF Author: Frederick Turner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300075939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
In 1893 a young Frederick Jackson Turner stood before the American Historical Association and delivered his famous frontier thesis. To a less than enthusiastic audience, he argued that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development"; that this frontier accounted for American democracy and character; and that the frontier had closed forever with uncertain consequences for the American future. Despite the indifference of Turner's first audience, his essay would soon prove to be the single most influential piece of writing on American history, with extraordinary impact both in intellectual circles and in popular literature. Within a few years his views had become the dominant interpretation of the American past. A collection of his essays won the Pulitzer Prize, and for almost half a century, Turner's thesis was the most familiar model taught in schools, extolled by politicians, and screened in fictional form at local movie theaters each Saturday afternoon. Now, a hundred years after Turner's famous address, award-winning biographer John Mack Faragher collects and introduces the pioneer historian's ten most significant essays. Remarkable for their truly modern sense that a debate about the past is simultaneously a debate about the present, these essays remain stimulating reading, both as a road map to the early-twentieth-century American mind and as a model of committed scholarship. Faragher introduces us to Turner's work with a look at his role as a public intellectual and his effect on Americans' understanding of their national character. In the afterword, Faragher turns to the recent heated debate over Turner's legacy. Western history has reemerged in the news as historians argue over Turner's place in our current mind-set. In a world of dizzying intellectual change, it may come as something of a surprise that historians have taken so long to overturn the interpretation of a century-old conference paper. But while some claim that Turner's vision of the American West as a great egalitarian land of opportunity was long ago dismissed, others, in the words of historian Donald Worster, maintain that Turner still "presides over western history like a Holy Ghost.". Against this backdrop, Faragher looks at what the concept of the West means to us today and provides a reader's guide to the provocative new literature of the American frontier. Rereading these essays in the fresh light of Faragher's analysis brings new appreciation for the richness of Turner's work and an understanding of contemporary historians' admiration for Turner's commitment to the study of what it has meant to be American.

The Great Frontier War

The Great Frontier War PDF Author: William Nester
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313002835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
For more than a century and a half, from 1607 to 1763, Britain and France struggled to master the eastern half of North America. They fought five blood-soaked wars and continuously provoked various Indian tribes to raise arms against each other's subjects for the mastery of the land. The last French and Indian War, from 1754 to 1760, would dwarf all previous conflicts in the number of troops, expense, geographical expanse, and total casualties. Placing the French and Indian War in a broad historical context, this study examines the struggle for North America during the two preceding centuries and includes not only the conflict between France and Britain, but also the parts played by various Indian tribes and the other European powers. The last French and Indian War makes for colorful reading with its array of inept and daring commanders, epic heroism among the troops, far-flung battles and sieges, and creaking fleets of warships. Ironically, America's most famous founder, George Washington, helped to spark the war, first by trudging through the wilderness in the dead of winter with a message from Virginia Governor Dinwiddie to the French to abandon their forts in the upper Ohio River valley, then a half year later by ordering the war's first shots when his troops ambushed Captain Jumonville, and finally when he ignominiously surrendered his force at Fort Necessity and unwittingly signed a surrender document in French naming himself Jumonville's assassin. Topical chapters discuss the economic, political, social, and military attributes of the participants, and narrative chapters examine the campaigns of the war's first two years.

The First American Frontier

The First American Frontier PDF Author: Wilma A. Dunaway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway challenges many assumptions about the development of preindustrial Southern Appalachia's society and economy. Drawing on data from 215 counties in nine states from 1700 to 1860, she argues that capitalist exchange and production came to the region much earlier than has been previously thought. Her innovative book is the first regional history of antebellum Southern Appalachia and the first study to apply world-systems theory to the development of the American frontier. Dunaway demonstrates that Europeans established significant trade relations with Native Americans in the southern mountains and thereby incorporated the region into the world economy as early as the seventeenth century. In addition to the much-studied fur trade, she explores various other forces of change, including government policy, absentee speculation in the region's natural resources, the emergence of towns, and the influence of local elites. Contrary to the myth of a homogeneous society composed mainly of subsistence homesteaders, Dunaway finds that many Appalachian landowners generated market surpluses by exploiting a large landless labor force, including slaves. In delineating these complexities of economy and labor in the region, Dunaway provides a perceptive critique of Appalachian exceptionalism and development.

Daily Life on the Nineteenth Century American Frontier

Daily Life on the Nineteenth Century American Frontier PDF Author: Mary Ellen Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1573566640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The nineteenth century American frontier comes alive for students and interested readers in this unique exploration of westward expansion. This study examines the daily lives of ordinary men and women who flooded into the Trans-Mississippi West in search of land, fortune, a fresh start, and a new identity. Their daily life was rarely easy. If they were to survive, they had to adapt to the land and modify every aspect of their lives, from housing to transportation, from education to defense, from food gathering and preparation to the establishment of rudimentary laws and social structures. They also had to adapt to the Native Americans already on the land—whether through acculturation, warfare, or coexistence. Jones provides insight into the experiences that affected the daily lives of the diverse people who inhabited the American frontier: the Native Americans, trappers, explorers, ranchers, homesteaders, soldiers and townspeople. This fascinating book gives a sense of the extraordinary ordinariness of surviving, prospering, failing, and dying in a new land; and explores how these westering Americans inevitably displaced those already bound to the land by tradition, culture, and religion. A wealth of illustrations complement the text of this easy-to use reference.

The Frontier in Latin American History

The Frontier in Latin American History PDF Author: Charles Alistair Michael Hennessy
Publisher: London : Edward Arnold
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description


Westward Expansion

Westward Expansion PDF Author: Ray Allen Billington
Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780023098604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 918

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Book Description
When it appeared in 1949, the first edition of Ray Allen Billington's 'Westward Expansion' set a new standard for scholarship in western American history, and the book's reputation among historians, scholars, and students grew through four subsequent editions. This abridgment and revision of Billington and Martin Ridge's fifth edition, with a new introduction and additional scholarship by Ridge, as well as an updated bibliography, focuses on the Trans-Mississippi frontier. Although the text sets out the remarkable story of the American frontier, which became, almost from the beginning, an archetypal narrative of the new American nation's successful expansion, the authors do not forget the social, environmental, and human cost of national expansion.